Title |
Deciphering CAPTCHAs: What a Turing Test Reveals about Human Cognition
|
---|---|
Published in |
PLOS ONE, March 2012
|
DOI | 10.1371/journal.pone.0032121 |
Pubmed ID | |
Authors |
Thomas Hannagan, Maria Ktori, Myriam Chanceaux, Jonathan Grainger |
Abstract |
Turning Turing's logic on its head, we used widespread letter-based Turing Tests found on the internet (CAPTCHAs) to shed light on human cognition. We examined the basis of the human ability to solve CAPTCHAs, where machines fail. We asked whether this is due to our use of slow-acting inferential processes that would not be available to machines, or whether fast-acting automatic orthographic processing in humans has superior robustness to shape variations. A masked priming lexical decision experiment revealed efficient processing of CAPTCHA words in conditions that rule out the use of slow inferential processing. This shows that the human superiority in solving CAPTCHAs builds on a high degree of invariance to location and continuous transforms, which is achieved during the very early stages of visual word recognition in skilled readers. |
X Demographics
Geographical breakdown
Country | Count | As % |
---|---|---|
Canada | 1 | 14% |
Romania | 1 | 14% |
France | 1 | 14% |
United States | 1 | 14% |
Sweden | 1 | 14% |
United Kingdom | 1 | 14% |
Unknown | 1 | 14% |
Demographic breakdown
Type | Count | As % |
---|---|---|
Members of the public | 7 | 100% |
Mendeley readers
Geographical breakdown
Country | Count | As % |
---|---|---|
Mexico | 1 | 2% |
Spain | 1 | 2% |
United States | 1 | 2% |
Unknown | 38 | 93% |
Demographic breakdown
Readers by professional status | Count | As % |
---|---|---|
Student > Master | 6 | 15% |
Researcher | 5 | 12% |
Student > Ph. D. Student | 4 | 10% |
Student > Bachelor | 4 | 10% |
Student > Doctoral Student | 2 | 5% |
Other | 10 | 24% |
Unknown | 10 | 24% |
Readers by discipline | Count | As % |
---|---|---|
Psychology | 12 | 29% |
Computer Science | 4 | 10% |
Neuroscience | 3 | 7% |
Engineering | 2 | 5% |
Social Sciences | 2 | 5% |
Other | 7 | 17% |
Unknown | 11 | 27% |